Overview

The ranks of Arab writers, foremost among the medieval world's geographers, are full of adventurers who wrote about their journeys in travel memoirs. Works such as the Rihla of Ibn Battuta combine travelogue with analysis of local characteristics and customs. Yet few of these writers would qualify as scientific geographers in the modern sense—few, that is, aside from al-Mas'udi, author of numerous works on history and geography, the most famous of which is known in the West as The Meadows of Gold. In this, a universal history covering the period from the world's creation to his own time, al-Mas'udi gained a reputation as a historian on the order of the greatest among...